THE THREE with Gemma Hartley

An interview, a photo story, and Pop-Up Questions

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Gemma Hartley is a freelance journalist, yoga teacher, public speaker and author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women and the Way Forward.

She has spoken on the topic of emotional labor around the world, from corporate conferences to festivals at the Sydney Opera House. Her writing has been featured in outlets including Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, Glamour, The Washington Post, CNBC, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Teen Vogue, and The Huffington Post.

She is passionate about creating a more equitable world in which invisible labor is valued and supported by both personal partners and public policy alike. 

POP-UP QUESTIONS

What writer romanticized being a writer for you as a young person? John Steinbeck. I read a lot of Steinbeck when I was young, probably entirely too young to understand and absorb what I was reading, but I knew the writing was beautiful - that it exemplified the "Great American Novel." I remember convincing all my friends in high school to read East of Eden, drinking from a communal Big Gulp spiked with vodka on long bus rides, and waxing philosophical about it for hours. I still have such a soft spot for Steinbeck's work. 

What is a quote that has endured in your mind?"So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart." - the last line of Billy Collin's poem The Names, which he wrote as a tribute to the victims of 9/11.

I think of it often, every time there is another tragedy that begets a new list of names. I think about it a lot in relation to gun violence, and lives lost during the pandemic, both of which are deeply intertwined with the broken state of our government. This is the quote that brings me back to compassion and grief, which I so often want to bypass on the path to rage and action. 

What occupies your mind most often on being a woman in America?Lack. Namely our society's utter lack of regard for women in nearly every aspect of our lives. The lack of support we're given. The lack of safety we're afforded walking down the street. Lack of social safety nets. Lack of money. Lack of childcare. Lack of trust in our own stories. Lack of bodily autonomy. Lack of power in the places where power matters. 

It's a long and dramatic list, but I've experienced them all, and really, who hasn't? Privilege and (a great deal of ) money can put you above the worst our society has to offer women, but you can't buy your way out of the culture you live in - here you will always lack and be found lacking.

What philosophy, religion or school of thought has given you something real, and what is that real thing?Yoga. It gives me a deep sense of peace and a level of universal compassion I didn't believe I was capable of experiencing. I decided to switch tracks and trained to become a yoga teacher last year (I teach six classes a week now). While I knew that there was a philosophical aspect of yoga, I had no idea the depth and breadth of the practice as a way of life. Luckily I was involved in a teacher training that was reverent and devoted to yoga as a spiritual path, and the bulk of our six months was spent studying yogic philosophy and building a true yoga practice in our lives. 

While yoga has long given me the benefit of greater presence and mindfulness in my life, yogic philosophy has given me new ways to approach life with the guiding principles of non-harming (ahimsa), devotion to truth (satya), and a lot of self-study (svadhyaya), which obviously appeals to me as a writer. There are many other yamas (universal morality practices) and niyamas (personal practices), but those are the three I engage daily and they always require a good deal of work. 

What books comfort you? Books that allow me to see my experience reflected back to me. When I was growing up, I had very little exposure to women writers. Every book we read in my (conservative Christian) school was SURPRISE! written by a man, and we had a lot of books that were banned on campus as well, including Harry Potter because witchcraft. When a friend gave me my first Tamora Pierce book in middle school it was like a revelation. Reading a book that gives words to the thoughts and feelings that make you feel alone? It's like a warm hug. When folks tell me that my work makes them feel seen, it usually brings me to tears. I think writing is the most sacred way to acknowledge a shared experience with a stranger. 

PHOTO STORY

The writer picks a photo from her phone and tells us about it.

I walked into my 11 year-old's room after dropping my kids off at school, and found that he had hung his stuffed animals from his bunk bed (Instead of, you know, cleaning up when I told him to. This was much more important). He's about to enter middle school, and I'm always relieved to keep finding these signs of weird, wonderful childishness. 

I remember going to yoga shortly after and absolutely weeping during savasana, it was days after Uvalde and I couldn't close my eyes without seeing all those babies. Even younger than this little boy hanging stuffed animals from his bed to keep him company. I hate that I cannot simply enjoy these moments of childhood without the stain of fear and heartache that always shadows them. 

THE INTERVIEW

Your book FED UP was a great read on the (even now) under-discussed subject of how women are expected to -and usually do- most of the emotional and mental labor in a relationship, especially as mothers, and what the toll of that is on women, specifically. You also discuss the way this affects men, which is primarily through a lack of meeting their partner as an equal and the loss that creates in the relationship, as well as the ways that men then can fail to bond in their family. I've been thinking about how since Covid, mothers are the ones who have faced and/or taken the greatest burden of parenting, as far as quitting or losing jobs and caring for kids while the country quarantined at home. On the other hand, fathers are spending more time with their children since Covid. What are your thoughts as you yourself have lived through this, and as you watched it play out in our society? 

Honestly, I get either despondent or angry (depending on the day) when I think about the pandemic and how, as a society, we squandered a chance for real change on this front. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that because we are doing so much more of this mental and emotional work, our partners, if we have partners at all, don't feel the same relentless pressure that serves as a catalyst for change. How are we supposed to come up with and fight for solutions when we don't have any breathing room in our lives? How do you protest and get loud in the streets and hold politicians' feet to the fire when your mental and emotional energy is so drained at the end of the day? 

We need allies. We need partners who give enough of a shit to show up for us, not only in taking on an equal load at home, but in fighting for the structural changes we need as well. Activism as a whole seems to have become another sect of women's work. We are the ones who are supposed to make the phone calls and send the emails and change our habits and the habits of our families. We're supposed to initiate and navigate the conversations regarding the invisible load we carry, explaining why others should give a damn about our lived experience. This is a whole new frontier I'm experiencing in my own relationship: I don't want to have to ask my partner to support the very obvious fights for equity, for racial justice, for our children's safety, for my bodily autonomy. I don't want to be the only one doing the research so I can give him an easy job to do - and even then, feel like an imposition for even asking. I don't want to have to remind him that these are his fights too, and yet I do. 

(It's an angry day, can you tell?)

During Covid you became a yoga teacher- congratulations! What yoga books do you love and why?

Thank you! My favorite yoga books at the moment are Judith Lasater's Living Your Yoga and Nicholai Bachman's Path of the Yoga Sutras. I love Lasater's book because it's so instantly relatable as a mother. Bachman's book was a foundational text for my teacher training, and I read it like a devotional now, rereading the same chapter each day for a week. It keeps me connected to the roots of yoga and helps me reflect on my own practice, which is much less about moving my body and much more about self-study and untangling how my past conditioning informs the way I move through the world. If anyone has suggestions for yoga books they love, I am always looking for a new one to read. 

How has your writing been impacted over Covid? Are the kids at home for most of the summer; do you write over the summer?

Early on in the pandemic, I was working on a novel and got a great deal of it done (about 48,000 words). Then I got COVID, before vaccines were available, and it utterly destroyed me. I am still coping with a lot of long-COVID complications, but those first few months were the worst. I couldn't look at screens or even books for weeks without getting sick (and lost many of my freelance jobs) and when I finally could return to writing, I found I had lost what seemed to be the last decade of my writing abilities. My brain fog was a beast, and every time I tried to write it ended in me crying over how newly stupid I felt. You could pinpoint exactly where the novel moved from pre-COVID to post-COVID, the writing became so strained and lacked the flow it previously had. I was devastated. Honestly, I still am. 

My writing life is currently nonexistent aside from journaling. I recently started a full-time job which has turned my world upside down and caused many full-blown breakdowns. Those breakdowns are usually fueled by the feeling that I have failed as a writer. Sometimes I blame COVID and sometimes I tell myself that if only I could have written another book, secured more freelance work, put my nose to the grindstone and got down 2,000 words each morning (or whatever it is that Stephen King does) I would be spending more time with my family and enjoying the life of a "real" artist. Neither makes me feel better, so hopefully one of these days I'll start writing again. I'm guessing it's the only cure for this sort of malaise. 

What are you working on now? 

Surviving. 

Leave us with a description of your writing area?

My cheap hairpin-legged desk is becoming a very woo-woo white woman mess of crystals and candles and a laptop that isn't getting nearly enough action. I have a thrifted leather captain's chair that is full of little pinprick holes from my two kittens ricocheting off of it, and there's usually a blanket draped across the side so I can wrap myself up while drinking tea and contemplating the writing that I'm not doing. There's a few greeting cards and papers I put on the desk so that I would deal with them, but instead I'm just avoiding the desk like the plague. Such is the workspace of a writer who isn't writing. When I do write, my workspace is meticulously neat and tidy, maybe a single black le pen and a purposeful notebook beside the laptop. Maybe it will be like that again someday soon. Autumn, I tell myself.